When I started getting interested in making my own Time-Lapse movies, I found it difficult to find a coherent tutorial on the web that contained all the information that I needed to get started. I hope that this brief introduction will fill this void. In this whole post, I am assuming that you have already got the images on your hard drive and have them processed. In a later post(s), I will talk more about these two other process aspects.

The great thing about Time Lapse is the magic of going from these 24 images to one second of the movie.

Software

There are many different applications that you can use. Here, I shall make a list of all the programs that a photographer will already have or that are available for free on the Internet.

One of the free options is Google's Picassa; there are others, but I prefer this one.

For most photographers, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (I use version 3)  and Photoshop (I use CS4E) are essential tools. These programs, while primarily known for their photo editing capabilities, can also be used to create movies. However, it's worth noting that Lightroom's movie creation features are somewhat limited.

Many people use two other programs: Quicktime Pro, Adobe Primer, and Final Cut. The last two are industry standards with many bells and whistles, which you don’t need for your basic template.

Photoshop CS4 Extended

1) Save the files in a numerical sequence, i.e. filneame-1.jpg, filename-2.jpg, etc

2) File>Open and select the first file in the sequence and check the image sequence box

3) A dialog box will appear for you to enter the frame rate you want to use. Note that if upon opening the image sequence you picked a file sequence of 2fps, then later in step 4, when exporting the video, you select 1fps, you will only get every second image appearing in your movie.

3) You can edit the file just like any other file in Photoshop, but the edits will be statically applied to each frame here.

4) File>Export>Render video and work through that dialog box

Picassa 3.9.7.585

1) Navigate to the folder with the images

2) Click on create a new Movie Presentation

3) When you first open this you will find a title slide which can be removed.

4) Go to the movie tab and change transition style to time lapse.

5) Once you have selected time lapse, you can select the frame rate you want to use. Here, I have selected 24fps, as well as the final output dimensions you want your movie to have.

6) Once every thing has been selected you can then click onto create movie and you are done.

7) Picassa's default location to store the videos that you create are in (on a mac) you>pictures>Picassa>Movies

Lightroom 3

The downside to using Lightroom is that it is limited to a frame rate of 10fps or slower. To overcome this, you can download a series of templates from http://lrtimelapse.com. 

1) Select the slideshow model.

2) Select which photos you want to be included in the movie, which you can do in three ways, either selected photos, flagged photos or all filmstrip photos.

3) Go to the preset panel and selected the frame rate you want the output video to be from the presets that you have just downloaded (on the left of the screen)

4) Then click on export to video.

Now that you have created your video, it is time to share it. Here is the video I created via Photoshop, which has been uploaded to YouTube. I uploaded the movie at 720p, which is not the default quality for YouTube videos, so be sure to bump up the image quality to see the movie at the highest quality.